


Chicken Out

by micehell



Category: Velvet Goldmine
Genre: Crack, Humor, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-17
Updated: 2010-10-17
Packaged: 2017-11-12 00:17:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/484519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/micehell/pseuds/micehell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The chickens apparently didn't like that kind of thing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Chicken Out

When Curt opened the patio door, a chicken squawked at him, wings flapping in what Curt assumed was the poultry version of _I will fuck you up bad!_ He shut the door before he found out for sure.

~*~

Arthur cut the carrots carefully, no more than three inches long, no less than two, and always, always right around the thickness of two toothpicks combined. It took a lot more time that way, and Curt would invariably say something about it not making the slaw taste any better to be so anal, but Arthur found a kind of satori in the work, and in how pretty it looked on his butcher block cutting board, so he didn't care. Lou said that Arthur's pride in his kitchen (especially with how poor his skills were with anything that had to be actually _cooked_ ) was pretty much the same as getting a tattoo that said _I'm a Queen!_ , but when Arthur was surrounded by all the soothing stainless steel, blond wood, and blue and white mosaic tile, (cooking skills or no) he really didn't care about that either.

He did care about making sure that everything was ready for the party on time, though, so when Curt came back into the kitchen not even a minute after leaving it, the grill obviously not set up and lit unless he'd turned into The Flash all of a sudden, Arthur's inner Queen put the carrots aside for the moment. "I thought you were going to get the grill set up? The guests are going to start to arrive soon, and it's bad enough that Vandio's driver is late with the delivery, I don't want it to be even worse that the fire's not even started when the meat finally gets here."

Curt had craned his neck to look at what Arthur was doing, his eyes rolling slightly at the carrots, but he just shrugged at that. "I'm guessing that Vandio's driver was already here, but I don't think we're going to be grilling anything today."

Arthur loved many things about Curt: his wry sense of humor, the fact that he looked all cool and bad boy in his jeans and punk band shirts, but that he was sweet and generous underneath it, and that he was fucking amazing in bed. But he would have paid good money to get him to explain something in a way that didn't require pulling the details out of him bit by bit. Frankly Arthur got enough of that kind of thing on the job. With the patience of a saint pushed way past his limit, Arthur asked, "Why aren't we going to be grilling today if the delivery was already made?"

Curt had stolen some of the carefully cut carrot sticks, so his mouth looked like a Dreamsicle of white teeth and crunched carrot as he replied, "The chickens apparently don't like that sort of thing."

~*~

When Arthur opened the patio door, a chicken squawked at him, wings flapping in what Arthur assumed was the poultry version of _I will kill you dead!_. He shut the door before he found out for sure.

~*~

Curt was eating some more of the carrots, wondering if maybe they did actually taste a little better all cut up in such a uniform way, when Arthur came back, face as white as if he'd seen a ghost. Or a chicken, really. Curt had expected to have to spend the day listening to Arthur's coworkers talk about politics or sports, two things he passionately didn't care about, while trying not to drink too much beer and/or accidentally wind up embarrassing Arthur. It wasn't a good way to spend the day, but then Arthur _had_ gone to the leather bar with him, and at least Curt got some food out of the deal, so he hadn't minded. What he hadn't expected was that when Vandio's said they had fresh chicken, that they really, really meant it.

Arthur pointed down the hall, verbal skills deserting him in the face of tragedy, and barely managed to stutter out, "Chicken!"

A couple of more carrot sticks convinced Curt that they really did seem sweeter in their conformist sort of way. Not that he was going to tell Arthur that. Instead he said, "What do you think, Chinese or pizza?"

~*~

The delivery guy from the Chinese place on the corner managed to get up to the front door to ring the bell before the first chicken attacked. When it was over, there were pools of sweet & sour sauce, pink and viscous, staining the sidewalk to the street, and ropes of black bean noodles spilling out of the ripped and shredded body of the delivery bag they'd come in. There were also deep tire tracks in front of the house where the delivery guy had burned rubber on his moped getting out of there, and they'd been blacklisted for delivery service from every restaurant in a ten-block radius.

~*~

What Arthur had planned was: a simple little cookout with some of his friends from work. There'd be beer and wine, some grilled chicken (done by Curt), and all the standard (non-cooked) side dishes to go along with them. There'd be good conversation, even if Curt's eyes would glaze over as he only pretended to listen. And later on in the evening, while the game was on and keeping his guests occupied with the traditional cheering on of their team and the also traditional insulting the umpire's lineage, Arthur would have quietly led a six-pack-more-tractable Curt upstairs to their private bathroom, locked the door, and then noisily sucked his dick until Curt's eyes glazed over out of something other than boredom or intoxication.

What Arthur got was: decidedly ungrilled chickens who were monopolizing the conversation, in that all his guests could say was, "What the fuck?!", and "Shit, it's attacking! Run for it!" Not that it was really a conversation, in that Arthur was trapped inside while his guests were fleeing for their lives, but in the wake of disaster, Arthur didn't really feel like quibbling over his own semantics. He was even back to square one on the side dishes, since Curt had apparently decided to go vegetarian in the face of impending death by main course.

He sighed as he heard the evil wave of _squawk, squawk, squawk_ that heralded the arrival of some more of his guest list that he hadn't been able to warn off in time. As he dialed the next number on his list, he took a long pull from his beer, the growing numbness of his lips and the fact that he giggled a little when he heard one of his (likely former) friends shout _It's alive!_ telling him that at least one item from his menu was doing just what it ought to.

~*~

Curt was a little drunk from the dent that he and Arthur had put in their beer supply as they waited the siege out. Nowhere near as drunk as Arthur, who usually had less tolerance than Curt anyway, but who was apparently trying to drink a party's worth of drinks all on his own. But, still, Curt was feeling mellow enough that he totally didn't see the attack coming. He barely even had time to breathe, let alone fight back when Arthur dragged him into the bathroom, ripped Curt's zipper trying to get his pants down, and then proceeded to give him the sloppiest, hopsiest blow job ever. Not that Curt would have fought back, since, even mellow, he enjoyed the hell out of it. Or he did right up until Arthur killed his afterglow by falling face first into his lap, Arthur's elegant nose colliding with something not at all elegant of Curt's that had been quite happy only moments before the impact. Curt wheezed a little and grabbed himself with all the care of the mortally wounded, but all Arthur did was mumble, "I _will_ have one thing go according to plan, damn it," right before he passed out.

~*~

Arthur woke up with a fuzzy mouth, a need to empty both his stomach and his bladder, and the excited cackle of chickens still sounding faintly from the yard. He pulled the sheet up over his head, for once agreeing with Curt's belief that mornings were made to be slept through.

~*~

Curt woke up to an empty bed (not unusual), a full bladder (not unusual), and the sound of Arthur screaming at the chickens that were apparently still surrounding the house (not usual at all). The bedside clock flipped over from 10:59 to 11:00 as an angry clucking started up from the yard, but it hadn't had a chance to change again before he heard Arthur shout, "I'll fry your gizzards up and eat them, and I'll like it!" Then there was the sound of running feet and the front door being slammed shut, then click, click, click as all the locks were slapped into place. Curt pulled the sheet up over his head, not even the threat of Arthur's cooking enough to shake his belief that mornings were made to be slept through.

~*~

Arthur had tried cajoling (mysteriously, everyone at Vandio's seemed to have forgotten all English but _No refunds_ ), and bribery (mysteriously, Curt no longer seemed to like blow jobs, instead flinching and clutching himself protectively when Arthur had tried to give one in return for a day of chicken catching), but he'd gotten nowhere with the chicken problem. He'd have handled it himself by marching right out into their yard and showing the hellbeasts how a full-grown man dealt with uppity poultry if it weren't for one small thing: he liked living.

He looked at Curt, thinking again that a man who would stage-dive into an hyped up, volatile audience should surely be brave enough to deal with a few measly chickens. He wondered, seeing as how a blow job had failed, if maybe he could shame Curt into doing it. "How does a man who had the nerve to laugh at the bear we saw at the leather bar last month, even though he was bigger than both of us combined, not have the nerve to face down chicken soup on the prowl?"

Curt just shrugged, his sense of shame years gone. "For one thing, I wound up with a broken nose because of the bear, so I like to think I learned a less from that... though _Don't laugh at someone who frequents a leather bar wearing pink chaps and a matching handlebar mustache if they're twice your size_ isn't actually a lesson that can be applied here, so your analogy sucks--"

Arthur couldn't help himself, the need to edit strong even though it wasn't important to the situation, so he broke in with, "It wasn't an analogy, it was--"

But Curt just ignored the interruption. "-- and two, the chickens are far more evil than that guy was, even without the mustache and chaps, so, yeah, I don't have the nerve."

After the shaming failed, Arthur tried pouting, offering to clean the bathroom for a month, threatening to shop at Albertsons, and promising to only eat beef from then on, but neither Vandio's, Curt, nor the chickens were helpful in the least.

~*~

Three days after the siege started, it suddenly ended. Curt was never sure if the chickens simply got bored or if they migrated south or something, but he was so happy when he woke up one morning to the absence of the sound of cackling, that he almost actually got up. But the joy of no-chickens was still there when he finally did get up, so it worked out for the best.

And when he finally learned to enjoy blow jobs again, it worked out even better.

~*~

Arthur was having a great day. Work had gone well, Curt had stopped flinching when Arthur went down on him, and the Chinese place was now willing to deliver as long as they came out to the street to get their order and tipped really well. His life was the best.

And if the junkyard the next block over had crossed out the word _dog_ on their warning sign and written in _chickens_ instead? Well, Arthur figured live and let live, and as long as the chickens were willing to let him live, then life was even better.

/story


End file.
